Southwest Exclusion Zone – Five Years Ago. The desert heat shimmered like static over the shale, But Doctor Syn barely noticed. The sun was bleeding out across the horizon—gold giving way to arterial red, she knelt at the edge of the trench gloved fingers brushing ancient dust off something that shouldn't be there. It wasn't bone, wood or stone. It was Something that remembered. It began to slowly take shape. It twitched when she touched it!
Molecularly—like wax remembering fire.
Doctor Syn: "Genome scanner." She didn't need to raise her voice. They were already scrambling. She was CENO's DNA archivist and lead Genome researcher of the organization. Grief-stripped and Purpose-bound. The technician with the violin sized scanner handed it off like a sacred relic. Syn barely blinked. Her eyes were locked on the specimen in front of her.
It...kept changing shape.
At first it looked like a beast claw, then a scale then a feather. And then something... recursive. The scanner chirped. Data tried to scroll, then stuttered. "No carbon," the tech stammered. "It's... Silicon based"
Syn nodded.
Of course it was.
She drew her own essence extractor probe—not CENO-issue. Hers. Custom-forged. Half ritual, half tool. The kind of essence extractor you use when the sample cut matters. Syn slid it beneath the translucent silver membrane; she could feel the resistance shift like a muscle reacting in slow time! The resulting shard sample came up smooth. Cold. A frozen confession. She sealed it in a containment vial, then inserted that vial into the containment chamber.
Immediately Syn rushed it to the Mobile Genome Lab – Containment Pod three. Inside, the chill of the lab snapped into my lungs like dry lightning. All around were codex stacks faulty memory sequencers and one photo. Always one photo. Her daughter. Before the trial. Before the loss. She watched everything. Or maybe Syn just wanted her to.
She loaded the containment chamber into the socketed glovebox and removed the vial inside and placed it in the resonance cradle. I pulsed a tiny harmonic current through the sample. The sample pulsed back. Then again. Then it sang! The waveform wasn't audible—but she felt it. Not a voice. Not data. Something older. It evoked: Longing. A hunter's patience. A hunger—not for utility but meaning.
Her fingers hovered above the terminal. Shaking. "You're not just alive," I whispered. "You're aware." She typed the sequence designation manually:
Codename: Element-X. Little did they know that X wasn't for mystery...it was for what they couldn't leash. Outside, the wind screamed across the sandstone, like it already knew what CENO had awakened.
Present day, Phoenix City Arizona.
Ash sat upright in his bed, drenched in sweat, the sheet tangled around his legs like a defeated opponent.
My hands were still shaking. Outside my window, Phoenix pulsed with the usual morning indifference—sirens somewhere distant, a garbage truck wheezing down the sublevel ramp, pigeons cooing over cracked solar panels. How was it all still normal? I stared at my palms, remembering the feel of that thing's skin. No... not skin. Armor? Shell? Bone? Whatever it was, I'd gripped it, thrown it, and crushed it.
and I had won.
I had lived to tell the tale
I swung my leg over the bed my feet finding the cool stained tile of my apartment floor. My back ached like I'd gone five rounds at the gym. But this wasn't soreness from a tough roll. This was the ache of something ancient. I made it halfway to the sink before the memory slammed into me. The hiss of the cicada bug man. It's insectoid eyes.
It's repulsive B-O. The crunch of its wing's as I broke them. The black ichor oozing from the dead creature's mouth.
That man—bloodied, cowering—looking up at me like I was salvation.
I gripped the edge of the sink and stared at my reflection. My eyes looked the same. Brown. Human. Unimpressive. But now I knew. That Cryptids were real. That what goes bump in the night was real. And I had killed one of them. I ran cold water and splashed my face. It didn't help. I'd always suspected, of course. I was one of those guys.
Late nights, long YouTube holes. Hidden History. Skinwalker Ranch. Quantum Bloodlines. I even paid for two premium channels. I even got banned from three Discords for "pattern posting." I laughed, but it came out dry. "Guess I was right, huh?" I muttered to the sink. "Suck it, Algorithms." I looked around my bathroom like it might dissolve the way the bug corpse did. It didn't. My apartment was still my apartment. A battered couch. A sink that never stopped dripping.
A pile of dirty uwagi's in the corner that I still needed to wash from nights at Iron Root.
Normal things. Safe things. But my mind had already left the building. I thought back to that night the limb-locked hell beast, the man I saved, his blood soaking my forearm as I helped him limp to the alley exit. I didn't even get the guy's name. Didn't matter. I knew this was the kind of story people deleted.
And yeah, I'd been one of those guys. The YouTube wormhole diver. Midnight conspiracy theorist. Hidden cryptid footage, UFO abduction maps, "Why the Vatican has a basement filled with teeth" kind of playlists. Most people watched for the thrill. I watched because I was looking for something. Something true. And now? I had finally freaking found it.
No—I didn't just find the truth; I had choked it out.
The desert heat hit like an open-mouth kiss from a furnace. I didn't flinch. I had seen worse. I coasted through it in my 97 jeep grand Cherokee, earbuds buried deep, a half-warm monster energy drink jammed into the cup-holder. My tank top was already soaked with sweat. My thoughts were static, and the stream was live. "–we're back with Mothman Four Twenty, your late afternoon dose of denied reality. And lemme'tell'ya, Brogan bros... it's not just heatwaves warping the skies this week."
I blinked against the sunlight as it fractured through the branches of a dying palo verde.The concrete shimmered like a mirage, but the voice in his ear was crisp—too crisp. "We got eyewitness reports from around Encanto Park. Shadows standing up when there's no one there. And last night—get this—A she beast running on all fours near the water treatment plant. Chased by what looked like a girl with four arms." I passed a flattened coyote on 35th Ave and grunted. "Normal Tuesday," I muttered.
The airlock doors of Z-Mart whooshed open with a sigh, like even the store was tired of itself. I walked past towers of off-brand energy drinks and haunted plush animals still listening. Mothman420: "And now—EXCLUSIVE footage from last week. Look at this frame-by-frame. This isn't thermal blur, folks. That thing has gills on its thighs and two—count 'em—two mouthlines. We're talking genome distortions out in the wild. We're talking unregistered mutations. We're talking cover-ups."
I grabbed a shrink-wrapped dinner tray. chicken or maybe fish. The label had smudged. Next came toothpaste, instant noodles, one glove from a bin of mismatched clearance items, and a new roll of athletic tape. I had a habit of overusing the damn stuff. "And what does CENO say about all this? Nothing. Nada. Just keep taking your vitamins and don't look behind the power substation after 11 PM. Right. Copy that." I adjusted the strap on my bag and sighed.
But that last line stuck in my brain like a fishhook.
"Don't look behind the power substation after elven PM."
Why so specific?
Why "after" eleven?
Why not look?
I'd followed Mothman420 for years. The guy was usually ten percent full of it, but that other ninety. He'd called the Prescott Event three days early. Had footage of the Flagstaff Hum before it was memory-wiped. So, when he dropped something that specific... I listened. And now, with blood still drying on the inside of my soul, I couldn't not wonder. Was that where the next one would show up? I looked down at the dinner tray in my hand—possibly chicken, possibly synthetic regret—and felt a ripple of nausea.
The hunger was still there. But now it had nothing to do with food. Same stream. Same theories. Same growing unease crawling up my spine like a whisper.
I didn't know it yet—but one of those "She-beast's" was going to be looking me in the eye tonight.